“If you care about animals, and if you believe that actions speak louder than words, The Lucky Ones is written for you. It will open your heart and inspire you to greater alignment between your compassion and your life. Jenny Brown’s book is beautiful and a blessing.”

- John Robbins, author of Diet For A New America, The Food Revolution, and No Happy Cows

“Jenny Brown’s passion for helping farm animals flows off of every page. The Lucky Ones is an affecting read, a cri de coeur for animals, a tale of personal triumph over adversity, a chronicle of institution-building, a love story, and a narrative of inspiration all at once.”

– Wayne Pacelle, President of Humane Society of the United States

“I’ve been a fan of Jenny’s sense of humor and passion for years, but my appreciation has just reached a whole new level. I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED this book. I laughed, I cried, and I marveled at this remarkable woman and her incredible story. The Lucky Ones is an absolute treasure.”

– Rory Freedman, bestselling author of Skinny Bitch

“Most people are grossly uninformed about the abuses and hazards of animal agriculture. Shining a light on the appalling practices behind America’s agribusinesses, The Lucky Ones is an eye-opening, candid, and irreverently funny memoir from an inspirational activist who shows how much difference one person can make in the world.”

“Jenny Brown is a tireless advocate for precious, yet voiceless creatures everywhere. Her new book The Lucky Ones is powerful, beautiful and heartbreaking – in the best way. This book could change the world, but only if you read it.”

Jenny Brown was once a successful television professional. But after a week-long trip spent undercover to film horrific farm animal abuse in Texas stockyards in 2002, she decided to give up her flourishing media career and dedicate her life to helping the animals forgotten by society.

In THE LUCKY ONES: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals(Avery Books/Penguin Group), August 2, 2012, $26.00, Hardcover) by Jenny Brown with Gretchen Primack, Jenny tells of how at the young age of 32 she’d already reached her goals in the documentary world working for the likes of Errol Morris, PBS’s Frontline, and the Discovery Channel. Then a dormant but deeply ingrained need to do something to really help animals rose to a head—an early mid-life crisis—and she volunteered for the Texas mission. She moved from Boston to rural Watkins Glen, New York, in 2002 to live and work at an animal sanctuary and learn all she could about shelter operations. There Jenny and her husband Doug found the confidence they needed to start a sanctuary of their own in Woodstock two years later. Today, Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary takes care of over two hundred rescued farm animals and has thousands of visitors annually. By placing people within eye contact of beings mostly known as food, the sanctuary changes hearts and minds about the animals abused in our industrialized food system.

But THE LUCKY ONES is more than the story of the sanctuary. It is a story that begins with a faithful friend, Boogie, the “tiny calico wisp of a kitten” who Jenny received as a gift at the age of ten upon losing her leg to bone cancer. Her relationship with Boogie sparked in her a feeling of responsibility and awareness about animals’ vulnerability. It stayed with her for the eighteen years of Boogie’s life, and it positioned Jenny to consider those living and dying in far-flung factory farms.

In THE LUCKY ONES, Jenny recalls the challenges in her life as an amputee through her tumultuous teenage years in Louisville, and traces her unlikely path from working the counter at McDonald’s to becoming a profoundly devoted farm animal advocate. She interweaves moving stories of the “animal ambassadors” who populate the sanctuary, like that of Albie, the three legged goat; Kayli, the slaughterhouse escapee cow; and Quincy, an abandoned Easter duckling found in a NYC park.

Jenny Brown pulls no punches: she includes vital statistics and shocking facts about lives of the 10 billion animals used for food every year in the U.S (that number doesn’t even include fish). She contrasts these cold realities with her first-hand knowledge of the individuals she’s encountered, and teaches us, for example, that pigs are the smartest domesticated animals in the world, cows are deeply emotional, and turkeys will compete for your affection. Labels like “Free-Range” and “Certified Humane” are exposed for what they are, shedding light on an ever-growing vegan movement across the nation as people become more aware of the conditions at farms and slaughterhouses large and small.

Blending wry humor with unflinching honesty, THE LUCKY ONES brings a compelling new voice to a healthy-living movement—and to the vulnerable, voiceless creatures among us.

Jenny Brown is the Co-Founder and Director of the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary—a not-for-profit organization and farm animal shelter located in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Jenny is an outspoken vegan animal rights activist who previously worked in television production until 2002 when she went undercover in Texas to film farmed animal abuse. That experience led her to dedicate her life to helping farm animals and raise awareness of their plight. Jenny’s story and the work of her sanctuary has been featured in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine, New York Magazine, New York Daily News, Rolling Stone Magazine, NPR’s Weekend America and more. You can read more about her and the sanctuary at www.WoodstockSanctuary.org

Co-writer Gretchen Primack is a poet and essayist and an administrator and writing professor with Bard College’s Bard Prison Initiative. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner,The Massachusetts Review, FIELD, Best New Poets 2006, and many other journals. Her chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007. An animal rights activist, she lives in the Hudson Valley with a beloved human and several beloved rescued animals. Her website is gretchenprimack.com.